How to Export Objects with Vertex Colors or Materials with PBR Textures from Blender 4.5 to Unreal 5
Hello everyone! To export objects with Vertex Colors or a Material with PBR Textures from Blender 4.5 and import them into Unreal Engine 5, the best choice is the binary GLTF format. In this short video, we’ll go through an example for each case, starting with the simpler one: Materials with optional PBR Textures.
Such a Material must have a Principled BSDF Shader and may optionally include one or more Image Textures, connected specifically to the Base Color, Metallic, Roughness, and Normal inputs. In the case of Normal, you’ll need to insert a Normal Map node between the Image Texture and the Principled BSDF node.
In the example I’m showing in the video, I’m exporting an entire scene made in Blender, where all the materials and sub-materials of the various objects meet these criteria. The Textures used here are Image Textures. If you want to export procedural Textures, you’ll first need to bake them, in order to obtain Image Textures. If you’d like a dedicated tutorial on baking procedural materials in Blender, let me know in the comments.
The GLTF exporter should be available by default in the Export section of the File menu. If it’s not, you can enable it from the Add-Ons section in Preferences.
In the export window, you can usually leave the default settings as they work just fine. Make sure in particular that the format is set to GLB, which is the binary version of GLTF. This way, the export will produce a single file on disk, which you can more easily import into Unreal. From this point of view, it’s similar to FBX with Embedded Textures. However, importing an FBX with Materials and PBR Textures into Unreal has often given me issues, which is why I recommend using Binary GLTF.
In Unreal, all I need to do is drag the GLB file from disk into the Content Browser, then place it in the current level and check that all Materials and Textures are set up correctly. As you can see, GLB correctly brings in the Textures linked to the different Material channels, with the Metallic workflow used by Unreal. Even Transmission information for glass and other semi-transparent materials, set in Blender’s node for the Cycles render engine, is transferred properly, so in Unreal we get Materials with transparency already set up.
Now let’s move on to the case of Vertex Colors, which are very useful when objects have a highly stylized look and there’s no need to create Materials or Textures. In fact, the objects I’m showing on screen now don’t even have a basic Material, but only their respective Vertex Color channels, which can be displayed in the 3D Viewport in Object Mode by choosing the Attribute display option.
In this case as well, the export is done with the default settings of the GLTF exporter in binary mode. What changes, compared to objects with Materials and PBR Textures, is the import process in Unreal Engine.
First, in Unreal, make sure that the Vertex Color Import Option is set to Replace in the Common Meshes section of the import panel.
As in the previous example, Unreal will create a folder named after the GLB file we exported. Inside the folder, we’ll find the exported objects, but no Materials, which makes sense, since the objects didn’t have any. I drag the objects into the scene, where they appear gray precisely because they don’t have Materials.
In the Content Browser, I create a new Material that I name Vertex Paint. In the Material Editor, I add a Vertex Color node and connect its first output to the Base Color input of the Material. I then apply the changes and go back to the main Unreal Editor.
I select one of the objects in the scene and drag the new Material, which I called Vertex Paint, into the Material slot. It’s worth pausing on this point. We can export objects with Vertex Paint colors from Blender, without Materials or Textures. In Unreal, only one new shared Material is needed for all these objects. This single Material only needs a Vertex Color node connected to the Base Color, and it will automatically set the correct colors for all the objects that use it.
To assign the Material to individual objects directly in the Content Browser, we need to click on an object to open its editor. Inside the editor, we can drag the Material into the appropriate slot.
Alright, that’s it for this tutorial! If you found it useful, you can thank me with a Like and by subscribing to the channel! Don’t forget to turn on notifications so you won’t miss the next tutorials. See you soon!